Company Overview

Landair (www.landair.com) has been helping manufacturing and distribution businesses with their transportation and logistics needs throughout the United States since 1981. Headquartered in Greeneville, Tennessee, the full-service transportation and logistics firm helps its clients solve problems using a wide range of supply chain management solutions.

The company’s track and trace services include transportation and third-party logistics. Fortune 500 clients like Sonoco, Lowe’s, and John Deere count on Landair’s technology infrastructure to support these services 24×7. The Landair IT department plays a critical role in enabling the operations team to deliver the world-class transportation, warehousing and distribution services their clients have come to expect.

Chris Dolese, Director of IT at Landair for the last 15 years, is responsible for overseeing all aspects of the organization’s technology infrastructure. Dolese and his team manage 32 virtualized servers, which support a network of over 200 users.

“We’re growing. With that comes volumes of data, a trend that is not going to slow down. We needed a storage solution that met our requirements for flexibility and scalability. Nexenta and Pogo provided just that, all on a reasonable budget.”

Chris DoleseIT Director, LandAir

The Challenge

As the transportation and logistics firm’s business needs continued to grow, the existing storage infrastructure was reaching the end of its useful life and needed to be phased out. Although the current IT set-up met the company’s needs, the legacy solution had become too time-consuming to manage, cost-prohibitive to scale-up, and increasingly more expensive to maintain. Landair did not want to expand its IT staff, so they needed a solution that was easy to implement and manage, with low, predictable costs.

Landair decided to upgrade its primary data backend with a unified storage system that could support both block- and file-level storage arrays across NFS and iSCSI networks, with out-of-the-box functionality. This turnkey solution also had to be certified to work with Citrix Xen, the virtualization platform powering Landair’s service infrastructure. Dolese, an evangelist of open-source technology adoption, wanted to explore Open Storage alternatives that might be less expensive to scale in the future. He also wanted enterprise features — like high-availability and unlimited snapshots — without overspending on proprietary hardware and software.

The Pogo StorageDirector HA Cluster is a pre-certified solution with optimized hardware, tuned specifically for performance and availability by the experts at Pogo and Nexenta (www.nexenta.com). The system features two file nodes connected to an expansion JBOD, providing redundant data paths. In the event one node fails, the second node picks up the workload, ensuring the continuation of operations.

As a full-service transportation and logistics firm, Landair must be able to deliver uninterrupted, 24×7 data access to its drivers and clients. The Nexenta HA cluster licensed feature enabled Landair’s IT management team to maintain around-the-clock transportation services while lowering their storage acquisition cost (compared with legacy HA technologies). Landair’s Open Storage HA cluster solution came in at one-quarter of the cost of a legacy closed-platform solution.

Business Benefits

Once the Pogo solution was deployed at Landair, system management became automated and maintenance was low-touch, requiring fewer dedicated personnel to oversee the data storage solution. Below are just a few of the business value benefits experienced by Landair’s IT department:

Open Storage – NexentaStor’s Open Storage functionality is much more flexible than the previous legacy storage, without concern about vendor-lock in. IT Director Dolese knew that storage expansion would also be easy to deploy, and price-predictable.

Effortless Deployment – With a Nexenta certified solution, Landair was able to deploy a turnkey Pogo Storage SAN in hours, not weeks. By delivering a faster time-to-value, Dolese was able to focus his team’s resources on higher business priorities, rather than spending precious time trying to build a SAN.

Storage for Virtualization – As a Citrix-ready solution on the hardware certified list (HCL), Landair’s IT department was able to create a single NFS share using bonded 10G Ethernet links.

Next Steps

• Configure a system online to get a baseline price
• Connect with Pogo Storage by email at sales@pogolinux.com or phone at (888) 828-POGO (7646) ext. 2
• Learn more about Nexenta-based solutions from Pogo Storage

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Pogo Storage, a Division of Pogo Linux, offers a wide range of network storage solutions for just about every IT project or budget. From a digital video archive to a highly-available SAN solution, Pogo Storage helps IT departments dramatically reduce cost with a hybrid storage strategy and breakout storage technologies. Discover how network storage is made easy by emailing sales@pogolinux.com or calling (888) 828-POGO (7646) to speak with a trusted storage advisor.